Requiem

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) composed “Requiem,” one of the most frequently quoted short poems in the English language, as his own epitaph. Despite its forbidding, even moribund title, “Requiem” explores the coaxing lure of death and its enticing promise of undisturbed repose, welcomed after a life teeming with both joys and sorrows. First composed in 1880 when Stevenson had just turned 30, “Requiem” is a young man’s meditation on the inevitability of mortality that conceives of the reality of death without the gentle solace of some myth-y afterlife. The poet does not want to die, certainly, but cannot find it in himself to fear death. Gladly live, the poet advises, and gladly die. Stevenson refuses to reimagine the grave as a stardust portal into some vast other after-world. An expression of Neo-Romantic High Victorian wisdom poetry, in which a poet speaks sincerely and directly to readers coming to the poet for insight into the shared human experience and how to handle life’s challenges, “Requiem” remains one of the most anthologized poems of a writer known otherwise for iconic exotic adventure novels often marketed (and largely dismissed by academics) as Young Adult fiction, most notably